Brusspup Goes Viral With Dazzling Optical Illusions

The artist, brusspup, provides image files so you too can create these animated optical illusions at home.

Like optical illusions? You’re going to love these. And the best part of it is, you can recreate them in your own home.

A YouTube user who goes by the name of brusspup has garnered quite a following by creating videos of dazzling optical illusions of his own making. The latest installment is a series of pretty amazing animations created by moving a sheet of parallel lines over another very cleverly patterned sheet. A walking stick figure, a pair of rotating sprockets, a running cat – alongside a real one – and, my favorite, Pac-Man successively eating bullets fired at him from a gun.

The consummate artist brusspup has even accompanied his visual creations with one of his musical ones.

The slat-lined template must be printed on a transparency sheet and, brusspup reminds us, if you’re printing on an ink jet, you must use the transparencies that are made specifically for ink jet printers. Also, don’t fiddle with the size settings, otherwise you’ll probably end up with an optical illusion that is more baffling than it’s meant to be.

What’s amazing – in addition to the animations themselves – is that brussup published his collection of new optical illusions only Sept. 4 and it already has nearly 5 million views (I’m very curious to know why 557 people “disliked” it). YouTube, not the Internet as a whole, seems to be the true communal medium whereby creative tinkers, garage bands and the like can reach out to the rest of the world and become literal overnight sensations. brussup’s still got a lot of catching up to do if he’s going to beat the KONY2012 video, and sometimes going viral is the last thing you want to do. But brussup isn’t just sharing his creativity on YouTube, he’s sharing his actual creations through the miracles of the Internet, PC, and printer. What might this sort of exchange look like in ten years or fifty years from now? Whatever it is, I’m pretty confident 3D printing will be at the very core of it, and the creative minds of the future will dazzle us anew.

Peter Murray was born in Boston in 1973. He earned a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore studying gene expression in the neocortex. Following his dissertation work he spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the same university studying brain mechanisms of pain and motor control. He completed a collection of short stories in 2010 and has been writing for Singula...